Helicos BioSciences towards personalized medicine

Helicos BioSciences Corporation announced today the start of its manufacturing operations in support of the commercial launch of its Heliscope system expected late in 2007.

What does it mean? For example, Helicos BioSciences plans to launch the world’s first single molecule genetic analyzer. Furthermore, as the company also works on disease association studies, in my opinion, this new era of biohealth companies can take us closer to new applications of personalized medicine:

Many diseases and conditions have a complex genetic component. In these diseases, multiple genes are involved in giving rise to an illness. By sequencing the genomes or selected genes of many individuals with a given disease or condition, it may be possible to identify the causative mutations.

I’ve already read several posts and articles on 23andMe, the famous personal genome company (with Google investments). And I’m pretty sure that many more biohealth companies will launch similar projects in the next couple of months.

And also note that while the word “buzzword” is more and more a buzzword itself. Just as an example in this comment, “buzzword” is mentioned no less than 4 times, even though it is a very short essay on the meme called buzzword.